May 4, 2012 #everydaymay

I really want to go see “The Avengers” this weekend. What I really wanted was to see it last night at midnight. I know I’m not going to be able to, which is kind of what led me to this next thought.

I love being a father. My son and I play little games. We go on walks through the neighborhood. We do Target and grocery store runs together. I make him laugh and I do my best to comfort him when he cries. Being a father is intensely rewarding in a way I didn’t know existed.

As much as I love being a father, I’m having a much harder time adjusting to being a parent. When you think “father” or even “mother,” as opposed to being a “parent.” you don’t think about a sudden loss of free time. You don’t think about having to clean up the kind of mess that until then had only occurred in your nightmares. You don’t think about the potential for your car seat to not necessarily be designed to fit very well in your car and subsequently spending an hour trying to prop up one part of the car seat with towels while simultaneously adjusting and tightening the archaically engineered strap and latch system so that your child’s head isn’t drooping down over their chest when they fall asleep in the car.

It’s a fallacy that those two concepts are separate in my mind, but I never could have known that until becoming a father. I’m only almost 10 months in, so I’m giving myself a little grace on first discovering that fact and then reconciling to how I operate.

Maybe this is one of those things that people mean when they say “being a parent is hard.”